What Drives Advances in Speech Recognition? or There's No Data Like More Data

Michael Picheny, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

October 27, 1998

Abstract

Advances in speech recognition over the last 20 years have been heavily driven by three factors: more data, more computation, and lots of competition. This talk will describe how these factors have driven the error rate on large vocabulary continuous speech down by more than a factor of four over the last several years, using various examples from signal processing, acoustic modelling, and language modelling. The talk will conclude with a demonstration of some technologies that have resulted from this progress, including IBM's latest speech dictation product, ViaVoice 98.